George Zimmerman: a paranoid victim of the illiberal bigots who made Trayvon Martin a ‘martyr’
GEORGE Zimmerman did not murder Trayvon Martin in Florida. The white vigilante did not murder the unarmed black youth.
A six-member, all-woman jury took 15 hours to deliver a not guilty verdict at the Seminole County Criminal Justice Center in Sanford Florida.
Zimmerman did shoot Martin dead on a rainy night when the 17-year-old was walking through a gated community where he was staying. Zimmerman was part of the neighborhood watch in Sanford, Florida. Martin had gone out for some iced tea and Skittles.
The two met. Some say Martin knocked Mr Zimmerman down and slammed the man’s head against the concrete footpath before Zimmerman shot his pistol.
Others say Zimmerman was a paranoid wannabe police officer and self-appointed vigilante captain who assumed the black teen was up to no good and took the law into his own hands.
And was it racist?
The Reverend Jesse Jackson compared Martin’s killing to the murders of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers. Till, a 14-year-old black boy, was murdered in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman. He said Martin was a “martyr”.
Was Martin killed because of his clothes – he had been wearing a hood? Jackson confronted that, too:
The danger of focusing on the hoodie is that he wasn’t killed because of the hoodie. He was killed because he was black. The issue is not the hoodie — it’s race, registration and civil rights.”
The Rev. Raphael G. Warnock announced he would wear a hoodie for today’s service at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta:
“We are doing this not for show, but to send a message that all humanity is sacred. And by saying all, we are including African-American boys and girls, and men and women who reserve the right to wear a hoodie in the rain and not be racially profiled and killed because bigots think that their appearance is suspicious, or threatening.”
But is this America the America of the early 1960s? No. But if you wanted to make it so, the death of Trayvon Martin could be a symbol of black victimisation. But isn’t it the shock at the killing that shows America in a better light than those awful times of segregation?
There are racists who see the killing of a back youth and fine. But they are not in the majority. The vast majority can see that killing an innocent black man is a terrible and tragic thing. It’s a death worthy of reporting, investigation and trial.
Other theories were tossed out there. Did Zimmerman kill because he was a Democrat? If it was “every parents worst nightmare“, which parents were we looking at, Martin’s or Zimmerman’s? Lies were told, the basic facts twisted.
Syreeta McFadden, Martin’s mother, opined:
“Only in America can a dead black boy go on trial for his own murder.”
Jelani Cobb sees no justice:
The familiarity dulled the sharp edges of the tragedy. The decision the six jurors reached Saturday evening will inspire anger, frustration, and despair, but little surprise, and this is the most deeply saddening aspect of this entire affair. From the outset— throughout the forty-four days it took for there to be an arrest, and then in the sixteen months it took to for this case to come to trial—there was a nagging suspicion that it would culminate in disappointment. Call this historical profiling.
The most damning element here is not that George Zimmerman was found innocent: it’s the bitter knowledge that Trayvon Martin was found guilty…
There’s fear that the verdict will embolden vigilantes but that need not be the concern: History has already done that. You need not recall specifics of everything that has transpired in Florida over the past two hundred years to recognize this. The details of Rosewood, the black town terrorized and burned to the ground in 1923, and of Groveland and the black men falsely accused of rape and murdered there in 1949, can remain obscure and retain sway over our present concerns. Names—like Claude Neal, lynched in 1934, and Harry and Harriette Moore, N.A.A.C.P. organizers in Mims County, killed by a firebomb in 1951—can be overlooked. What cannot be forgotten, however, is that there were no consequences for those actions.
Zimmerman’s lawyer Mark O’Mara added:
“George Zimmerman would have never been tried by Florida if he was a black man. If he was black, those people who would have decided to make him a scapegoat would not have.”
Discuss…
Posted: 14th, July 2013 | In: Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
